Escher at the Dalí
The Dali Museum, 1 Dali Blvd, St Petersburg, through Jan. 3
727- 823-3767, thedali.org
Escher is more than just that psychedelic poster you had in your dorm room back in the days. Dr. Hank Hine, Dalí Museum Executive Director, speaks of the artist: “Escher, like Dalí , played in a serious way with that fundamental question of visual art — What is real? Is the world as it looks to be, or have I constructed an illusion in my mind?”
In the new special exhibition “Escher at the Dalí ,” at no other place than the Dalí Museum, there are 135 works on loan from the Herakleidon Museum in Athens, Greece, ranging the entire scope of his artistic career.
Escher’s rarely seen earlier works, while still demonstrating his talents, seem sterile in representations of life. This clinical portrayal of the day-to-day is especially noticeable in Portrait of Jetta, one of the few depictions of his wife. While the print glows in its dark moodiness, he seems to strip Jetta of her personality, and any impression of her as his lover.
His aesthetic style developed dramatically when he and Jetta visited the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. Dazzled by the Moorish geometric mosaics covering the walls, Escher sought to bring representational imagery to these interlocking patterns and designs. Birds and fish were his go-to source of imagery while he was first testing the waters of tessellation, like in Sky and Water II. Starting at the top of this piece, flapping birds descend upon the “water” in a hoard. Suddenly, the negative space between the birds transforms, and the birds are colliding into fish. The fish then emerge from the negative spaces that were birds and swim off into the depths of the inky, black water.
Though Escher and Dalí shared the playful notion of questioning what is real in a 2D pictorial space, there are stark differences in their work. Dalí work is doused in symbolism through surreal landscape, while Escher had no interest in symbolism and didn’t associate himself with the Surrealists. Escher talks about his own work: “All I am doing in my prints is to offer a report of my discoveries.” He achieves this not only by mastering the technical difficulties of depicting depth of field on a flat surface, but by creating poetry in the mathematics of everyday objects.
What, you say? Escher dabbled in sculpture? One of the most interesting pairings in the exhibition is his Cubic Space Division (sculpture study), placed directly in front of his print Cubic Space Division. Viewing these pieces together creates a chicken-and-egg situation: which came first? Does that even matter? And what led Escher to escape the confines of paper to bring his dimensional landscapes to life? With this sculpture study being one of the two sculptures on display, we only get a small taste of this side of Escher, which brings about more questions than answers.
In addition to finished prints, the show includes a few original printmaking wood blocks. Being a behind-the-scenes junkie, I wish the exhibition had included even more print blocks because they serve as artifacts to his labor-intensive process. After all of the hard work out into his woodcuts, lithographs, and engravings, he only made about 20-40 reproductions per block.
In a well thought-out exhibit, the Dalí Museum succeeds in meeting the artist’s goals of creating ambitious works of art that are challenging and serious, but accessible and entertaining for the public. Escher wanted to show his version of perfection — the world as it should be — through the symmetry and infinity of these tessellating designs. His works reward those that stop to take a closer look at the details. You’ll find that things aren’t what they seem to be.
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2015.